Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to electronic circuits and, more specifically, to circuits executing modular exponentiation operations. The present disclosure more specifically relates to the protection of such a calculation against fault-injection attacks.
Discussion of the Related Art
In many applications, electronic circuits implement algorithms of encryption, authentication, signature calculation, and more generally algorithms manipulating data, called secret data, that is, the access to which is desired to be reserved to certain users or circuits. Among such algorithms, some use modular exponentiation operations including all or part of the secret data.
There exist many methods, called attacks, to attempt discovering or pirating such secret data. Among such attacks, so-called fault injection attacks comprise disturbing the circuit operation at specific times of the execution of the operation. The interpretation of the consequences of such fault injections on the circuit operation or on the provided results gives the pirate information relative to the secret data.